The Key Aspects of Website Design

The Key Aspects of Website Design

When new visitors arrive at your website, you only have a few seconds to make a good first impression. That puts a real premium on website design. The best websites will not just look good – they will also provide an excellent user experience that makes it very easy for visitors to find what they need.

Aesthetics

When most people think of website design, the first thing they think of is the overall look and feel of the website. Is the website “on brand” with the rest of your business? What types of colors, images, fonts and icons are you using? If your brand is a luxury brand, for example, you will need to make sure that the overall aesthetic helps to reinforce your brand image.

And keep in mind, too, that every web design choice you make comes with a number of trade-offs, some of them very subtle. For example, let’s say that you want to include a lot of high-resolution images on your website. Well, all of those images will increase the weight of the page, making it very slow to load. Do you really want website visitors to wait impatiently while a page loads?

Functionality

Good website design also means that the website should be easy to navigate. In the old days of website design, this usually meant creating very elaborate menus and even “site maps” to guide users to specific pages. But, fast-forward to today, and that type of design has been replaced by “hamburger” menus that expand only as you need them, and a much more streamlined web browsing experience.

Usually, wireframes developed during the design process can help to track user flows on a website. Whenever a user arrives on a particular page of your website, he or she should know exactly what to do. This helps to streamline the overall experience. For example, an e-commerce website should be designed with one goal in mind: making it as easy and as intuitive as possible for people to add items to their shopping cart and then checkout.

User experience/User interface

The two areas of user experience and user interface are generally referred to as UX/UI. The goal of UX/UI designers is to create the best possible website experience for the customer. Thus, while placing a lot of text on a page for SEO purposes might seem like a good idea, you have to balance that with the need for a very uncluttered experience. Many features that might seem like a good idea from the perspective of a business owner – such as chat windows that pop up all over the page, or constant pleas to sign up for a newsletter – might actually be viewed as annoying by the average user. Those are all questions to be answered by your UX/UI team.

Just keep in mind that trends in website design tend to change every few years. In today’s mobile-first world, for example, a website must look as good on mobile as it does on desktop. This has put a real emphasis on websites that don’t “break” when they are viewed on a mobile device.

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The key question, of course, is whether you would like to build a customized website from scratch, or whether you are happy with a template-driven website. In the case of a template-driven website, you need little or no coding experience to make a great-looking website. That might be OK if your business is very small – but as your company grows, you will need to consider the functionality of your site and user experience even more, and that will inevitably lead you to consider a professional web design company like Marketing Beep.